


You Can Only Run So Far (So Please Come Back)

by BrokenHazelEyes



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, captain america winter soldier
Genre: Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Remembers, Capture, Hurt, Hurt Bucky Barnes, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mental Illness, Mental Instability, Possessive Steve Rogers, Rescue, Self-Harm, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-22
Updated: 2015-05-30
Packaged: 2018-03-25 05:03:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3797734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrokenHazelEyes/pseuds/BrokenHazelEyes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I love you, punk.”<br/>Then Bucky’s gone, sprinting down the hallways and running from Steve’s enraged howls.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is just a terribly written musing of mine, but if you like it then enjoy. I own nothing.

            Cold, a word that implies degrees of severity, a word that makes the strongest of men and women shiver, a word that Steve hates. He hates the cold, hates what it took from him, and what it gave him back. It took Bucky ( _howling down the chasm, icy wind distorting his cries)_ and that one loss is enough to make Captain America forever carry cold as his kryptonite. He hates it, god damn loathes it because it gave him life. It took Bucky’s, and let the Captain believe he would be reunited with his Sergeant ( _“I have to put her down in the water”_ ). Then it took Bucky again, left him in cryo for H.Y.D.R.A., for the agony they inflicted.

            He hates cold, and it’s taken to his bones now, to his marrow.

            Shouts echo around in his head, familiar voices but they aren’t Buck’s so he lets his eyes stay shut and his shoulders slumped. His arms are stretched far above his head, aching and numb, and there’s wetness on his brow. _Blood,_ his mind supplies, _you’re bleeding._ It starts coming back, and the cold recedes a bit as his body starts to move again.

            His legs, crumbled under his mass, right themselves and Steve’s torso sways like a tree in a hurricane as he rises to full height, arms now at his side. Blinking his eyes open, and licking his dry lips, the situation finally starts to compute in the Captain’s mind.

            Captured. H.Y.D.R.A. _fuck._

            “Finally awake, Capcicle?” Tony’s rough voice cuts through the final bit of fog in Steve’s mind, but it still takes the bigger man a second to finish getting his bearings.

            “Yeah,” Steve groans, rubbing at the blood on his face, “what happened while I was out?”

            Natasha, who had been silent beside Tony, pulls at her own chained hands and mutters something in Russian, but Tony keeps quiet and lets her answer.

            “Nothing, really. They didn’t try to get any information, just left us here after they managed to knock you out.”

            Steve nods, huffing out a breath and rolling his weary shoulders. He opens his mouth to speak, but the door to the cell opens with a muted screech and a man walks in.

            No, not a man. A monster. Pierce.

            “Have a good nap?” The suited agent asks sarcastically, but Steve doesn’t pay attention to that, only to the fact that there are no soldiers following their leader into the room.

            Wait, no, one does, and Steve’s heart stops at the sight.

            The Winter Soldier, _Buck_ , strides into the room with mechanical movements, the metal arm dull and scuffed. There are bags under his dead eyes, and a bruise on his jaw. They’re all things that make Steve sick to his stomach, and his knees threaten to buckle and leave him on the floor once more.

            “Surprised?” Pierce asks, part honesty and part condescending, “You’re aware of H.Y.D.R.A’s stance of failure,” the agent casts a hard and hateful look at the broken shell, “so, as protocol, after The Asset finishes his mission he will be…” Pierce grins, but then mutters under his breath about _such a waste_ , “decommissioned.”

            Steve wants to scream at Bucky, not because _he’s_ afraid of death but because he can’t let Bucky die like this. Like a wounded animal, mind too far gone in fever to register danger, getting put down with no second thought. But he can’t, he can’t open his mouth and his throat is so tight…

            Pierce pulls a gun from a holster below his jacket, handing it to Bucky and smiles at Steve.

            “Ironic, isn’t it? He died for you,” Pierce juts his chin at Bucky, “and he’ll be the same one to kill you.”

            Bucky raises the gun, trained expertly on Steve’s center mass, but quick as a whip he swings around and cocks Pierce over the head with the butt of the gun. The man goes down, temple bleeding, and Bucky pulls a knife out of a sheath on his thigh. There is no hesitation; just a flick of the wrist and the blade is buried in Pierce’s heart. It’s silent, but Bucky still holds still for a few seconds, waiting and on guard, before rising up and putting the gun in an empty holster on his side.

            “Do you know the way out?” Bucky asks, his accent thick but it’s all business.

            “ _Bucky..”_ Steve’s throat is raw, and his voice is half-gone, but his eyes are full of tears and hope.

            “Do you know the way out?” Bucky repeats, voice hardened and some of the accent slipping away.

            He doesn’t wait for an answer, just bending back down to frisk at his handler’s corpse and when he stands up he’s holding a key.

            “You can’t follow me, when I let you go. Get out of here, and get far enough away from the blast zone.”

            “Bucky, no,” Steve pants with horror, pulling at his chains, “please, let me help you.”

            Bucky’s eyes lighten, and his lip twitches at what might have once led to a smile, and his voice isn’t as rough when he speaks, “Stevie, you gotta let me go,” he sooths the panicking Captain.

            “I’m never letting you go again!” Steve roars with no thought of the others in the base, but now Bucky’s twitchy and not taking his gaze off the door. Debating his options, the sniper makes his way to Natasha.

            He unlocks one of her hands, and quickly backs up incase her hands try and grab him. Hurt him. Bucky isn’t sure, and it’s not something he wants to find out.

            Kicking the key her way, he hisses, “Don’t follow me. And get out. Get to somewhere safe.” Then Bucky turns his gaze to the fuming super hero, Natasha already out of her bonds and freeing Tony but smartly leaving Steve in his bonds.

            “I love you, punk.”

            Then Bucky’s gone, sprinting down the hallways and running from Steve’s enraged howls.

 

            The base is vast, and Bucky draws his gun from the holster as he dips around a corner but it’s as empty as his throat is of words. He ducks into rooms, conserving bullets but taking out anyone he sees as he makes his way towards the control room.

            There is pleading, and praying and crying, but Bucky doesn’t pay attention. He’s as cold as the Winter Soldier, but his targets are now the ones who made him.

            Finally, the hallways stop narrowing and curving and Bucky knows he’s close to his target. Sure footed and swift, he swings into the control room and stains it with blood. A bullet hits his flesh shoulder but it doesn’t slow him down, though it burns as he types in command codes at the now vacated computer.

            It’s a sense of finality, a weight lifted from his shattered shoulders, when the countdown for self-destruction begins. All the doors start sliding shut, and those left alive pound at the doors but Bucky has gotten out from the slowly-lowering door to the control room and he’s now dashing toward the exit.

            He hopes to god that Steve and his comrades have gotten out and far enough away, but there’s a nagging in his skull that tells Bucky that Steve didn’t leave willingly.

           

            Bucky barely makes it a hundred feet before the explosions start, and he’s thrown off his feet and into the ground. It hurts, and there’s a buffeting wave of heat that turns his face red, but he’ll live. With bruised ribs, a shoulder and a killer headache but he’ll live.

            There’s a forest to his left, dark and looming but it looks silent and that’s enough for him, but he’s distracted by frantic cries of his name. It sounds like sobs, but the syllables of his name are clear as day.

            Tasting blood on his lip brings Bucky back to awareness, and he pushes himself off the ground with a cut off groan and dusts himself off. There’s a figure on the horizon, and Bucky knows automatically that it’s Steve.

            He knows what Steve wants, and he wants that too but right now that isn’t an option.

            “I’m sorry,” Bucky whispers and drinks in the look of Steve until he gets too close and Bucky knows he needs to leave, “but there’re things I need to do. One day. I promise.”

            Then he takes off, Steve desperately trying to catch him, and disappears into the hulking trees with a flash of silver.

            “ _I love you, punk.”_

           


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for any formatting errors, it's late and I'm too tired to fix it at the moment. Anyway, I really hope you enjoy this chapter. I'm thinking about adding one more part, so I guess we'll see. This chapter was inspired by the song "Hush" by HELLYEAH.

Six weeks had passed since Bucky had seen Steve; since he’d left him in the wind and ignored his heart-wrenching screams. Since he’d ignored his tears and his sobs and good God Bucky was going to fall to his knees and break. Break here, right on the damn cold floor with blood staining his boots and running down the lines of his metal arm.

Dropping his gun, which falls with a sharp clatter that nearly spooks him and Jesus his mind is shattered, Bucky leans against the crimson-red, dripping wall behind him and sucks in a breath.

There’s a body off to his left, and five off to his right, and he’s pretty sure there’s some shrapnel in his leg but fuck it. He knows, and simply _knowing_ something is a gift ( ~~curse~~ ) itself, that Steve’s only minutes away because that beautiful man doesn’t know when to give up on a lost cause.

Bucky’s metal fingers trail over the red lines on his forearm, some neatly placed and other messy slashes, and lets the agony of his wounds (his leg is burning now, the shrapnel seemingly rubbing against his bone) clear his mind.

He’s miscalculated, and horror slides under his skin like electricity, because the base’s doors are opening and Steve’s cadence is so easy to hear it’s pathetic. He has to hide, he has to get away. He can’t trust himself around the blonde angel, he’s a killer with a mind devastated like cheap glass.

The vents are pocketed with bullet holes, and the metal is slippery with his blood but he’s out of view of Steve but he can still hear the sharpness of his breath.

“Oh god…” Steve stutters below, moving away from the vent as the blood drips onto the floor from the holes (but he doesn’t put the numbers together, doesn’t register that it’s the man he’s been searching for up there—bleeding like a stuck pig).

“Bucky?” The man calls, and Bucky has to bite his fist to not respond because it hurts worse than any of his wounds; worse than the arm, the chair, the bullets, the cuts and he could never press the blade tight enough to hurt like this. “Are you here? Please, please… I need you, Buck…”

Bucky wants to respond so badly, tell Steve that he needs him too and he just needs to wait a little longer until the Winter Soldier has fled the bomb-pocketed battle field of his brain but he keeps his jaw clenched shut.

Eventually, Sam pads in after his friend and carefully places a hand on his shoulder (and Bucky watches from the vent greedily but thankful) but Steve shakes it off and sinks down to the wet floor.

“I just…” Steve mumbles, and Bucky ponders leaving because he knows he can slip away even when injured and he can feel his heart tearing apart like the flesh of his shoulder when they’d sawed his arm away, “I need him… And I’m never fast enough… I was never fast enough,” Steve sobs, “I wasn’t fast enough to catch him, I wasn’t fast enough to find him when I was running around with the Avengers and he was being abused, and I’m still not fast enough to goddamn find him and bring him home. I can’t keep him safe! I’ve always let him down, when he did everything he could for me _, I fucking failed him_.”

Yeah, Bucky should have left before because now he isn’t in Mission mode, he’s frantic. Scrabbling through the vents (and vaguely hearing Steve’s shout) and fingers nicking corners until everything smells like iron, Bucky races for the exit. He has to get away; he doesn’t have a place to go, just anywhere but here.

“BUCKY!” Steve’s screams echo through the vents, but the metal-armed man has reached the roof and is grappling his way down the side of the building and into the European wilderness.

Lungs burning worse than his bleeding, oozing wounds, Bucky sprints into the cover of darkness where the demons can’t see the tears running down his blood-smeared face.

Steve, damn him, isn’t giving up as easily this time because Bucky can hear him crunching through the foliage in pursuit. The Winter Soldier, like Fenrir being freed from bondage, roars awake in his chest and rips through his flesh like a supernova imploding and screaming to turn and kill like he’s been trained to do. Like he’s fated to do; since he threatened to slice throats in alleys for a skinny boy with too-innocent eyes, since he shot men in the head without honor or mercy for a star-spangled man, since he was strapped to a chair and reborn into the mere embodiment of sin that only existed because he was not afraid of death. He was not afraid to die, so long as Steve could stumble on with that weight of hope on his shoulders that Bucky had long since bucked off to make room for carrying Steve’s security.

He can’t slow down; can’t let Steve catch him while there’s a ghost thrashing against his lungs and blacking out his vision and slipping cold hands into his guts and pressing kisses to his cuts. His mind is torn; paper burning in a fire-pit and the ashy-pieces fluttering like butterflies of mourning in the air. Sickness is within him, and he’s afraid to corrupt Stevie.

How long has he been running? An hour? Two? God, there’s blood everywhere (the Soldier scoffs, sinister eyes of the wolf trailing each thought in his mind like they’re movements of prey, because the enemy can follow him much easier when he’s like this) and it trails behind him like a river to the edge of the world.

Stopping to lean against a tree, and smearing blood against the bark like his seal, Bucky pants and tries to listen for Captain America’s steps.

There’s a flash of silver, a gust of wind, and a man in front of him. It processes like a computer dying of viruses, clicking together but parts chipping off.

The man puts his hands out, metal wings stretched behind him like a bionic angel, and the Winter Soldier, oddly, quiets and slips into the back of his mind. This is not a threat, this is not one the missions that’s been hardwired into his skull or bruised into his cracked ribs.

No pity rests in the man’s eyes, only understanding and acceptance (is that why the Soldier is lurking under his tongue? He’s afraid, afraid of _not_ being alone in the world of torture and war and blood and corpses?) but there’s words coming from his mouth and why can’t Bucky hear in English? Why is it broken Russian, slicing his eardrums, and acidic German, burning his lips, that rolls through his brain like the train he’d fallen from?

Suddenly, the words don’t matter because there is a presence behind him and Bucky swings around so he can keep an eye on Steve’s friend—Sam, right?—and the aforementioned man.

“ _Bucky_.”

It’s love, it’s hope and it’s crushing relief; it’s broken and ruined and half-dead. It’s his name, and the Winter Soldier nods acceptance at difference even as he rips Bucky’s gums and pulls at his teeth to keep him quiet. The cuts burn, pulsing below the flesh, as the world begins to spin and the blood isn’t rising to his heart because it’s rushing out his leg. Stepping back, he’s unable to speak because the Soldier has his hands wrapped tight around his throat and is threatening punishment and agony like he’s suddenly the handler of his carcass; this man.

There’s only running left, even as the Soldier whispers ways to kill in his ears like the fountain of life slipping past his membranes, so that’s what Bucky does.

Taking off faster than ever, and perfectly aware that Steve has never been more dangerous than now (eyes focused, not clear but agonized and trained, lips set tight and muscles bunched up tight), the Winter Soldier guides his feet like a deer and not a wolf with begrudging compliance (because he surely doesn’t want to be in the Captain’s clutches, he doesn’t see it the way Bucky does—that Steve’s arms are the doors to Heaven and light and hope and love and he doesn’t deserve that).

He has to be even more careful now, with Sam flying overhead like an angel of fate ready to pluck him off the floor and throw him into reality, so he keeps under heavy tree cover with a pace that pumps the blood out faster and faster.

Steve’s screaming for him, soaked in the blood of Bucky’s victims, and one by one each one of Bucky’s heartstrings snap and threaten to let what little blood he has left gush into his ventricles.

So Bucky keeps running, slumped in his own body as the Soldier frees them once more, and letting _himself_ slip away. God, he’s tired.

The Soldier orders him to sleep, no worry or concern in his voice, to lie back and let go. Give himself over to the wolf, who’s running away like a buck from a hunter (all powerful, coiling muscle and deadly antlers but still wide-eyed fear in every sinew).

So he does, mind too lost to think otherwise, and shatters alone in a stranger’s body while Steve screams and pleads and the Soldier continues to run with robotic determination.

He’s slipped so far.

For the second time, Bucky escapes in the vastness of the wild (and the dark and the cold and loneliness).

For the second time, Steve screams on alone.

 

 


End file.
